Helen Dorn: The wrong witness

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Episode of the series Helen Dorn
title The wrong witness
Country of production Germany
original language German
Production
company		 Network Movie
length 89 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
classification Episode 6 ( list )
First broadcast November 26, 2016 on ZDF
Rod
Director Alexander Dierbach
script Mathias Schnelting
production Jutta Lieck-Klenke
Dietrich Kluge
music Wolfram de Marco
camera Markus Schott
cut Janina Gerkens
occupation
chronology

←  Predecessor
imminent danger

Successor  →
Merciless

The False Witness is a German TV film by Alexander Dierbach from 2016. It is the sixth episode of the ZDF crime series Helen Dorn with Anna Loos in the title role .

action

Alena, who cleans the Düsseldorf airport, often takes her son Roman to work because she doesn't want to leave him alone at home. Since she cannot supervise the boy all the time, he wanders around the airport and steals a passenger's cell phone. He follows the child into the personal toilets and wants his property back by force. The mother who arrives sees her son lying on the floor threatened by a stranger, reaches for a large fire extinguisher and knocks the man out with it. In the evening Herbert Krämer is found with a broken neck and detective chief inspector Helen Dorn is called to the scene because the victim has a large amount of cash with him and is obviously traveling with a false name. Based on surveillance recordings, Helen finds out that a cleaning lady was working in the staff rooms at the time of the crime, so she starts a search for the woman.

Helen receives "support" from Christina Behrens, a colleague from the BKA, because the victim has been an informant about organized crime activities for some time. In the current action, he was supposed to provide the BKA with files containing information about money laundering activities. Hagen de Winter was Krämer's client and the BKA is primarily interested in finally getting their hands on material against the man. Helen is not very enthusiastic about the arranged collaboration with Christina Behrens and continues to research on her own as usual. Based on the movement profile, the victim made a stopover in the city. That leads the investigator to Kerstin Brandt, the half-sister of the victim. When Helen tries to find her, she finds the woman dead in her apartment. She was apparently tortured and is believed to have told her tormentors where her brother was. Helen is sure that Hagen de Winter is behind it, as this is exactly his signature. She pushes her search for the cleaning lady in the hope that through her she will have a witness that Hagen de Winter was at the airport. Via the cleaning company, Helen finds a Roma settlement where Alena is being held because she still has to work off the smuggling costs for clan chief Branko. Alena takes her chance and claims to have seen two men at the scene just so that Helen could get her young son out of custody. Alena has barely got her boy back when she goes into hiding with Roman. However, she is picked up by the police when she tries to steal food for her son and herself. Roman can hide and appears in the evening to seek help from Helen Dorn. He hands her the dead man's cell phone, which he still had with him. When she then discovers the files that convict Hagen de Winter of money laundering, the case seems to have been resolved. But her supervisor hands over the material to Christina Behrens, who, in turn, surprisingly enters into a deal with de Winter and lets him go free. However, Helen has no intention of closing the case and persists, she does not give up and continues investigating. In doing so, she comes across a ring of child prostitution that Hagen de Winter runs with children whom he has Branko procure. Since Alena's son Roman has also been to the house where these children are being held, he can help Helen find this house. The commissioner goes into the building single-handedly and can free the children. You also meet de Winter there, who is shot and arrested by the arriving SEK. He protests that he did not kill Krämer because his sister could not tell him where he was. Helen looks at an old investigation file on child abuse from 1999 and finds a reference to her police colleague Redl, whose son fell into the hands of child molesters and later hanged himself because he could not process what had happened.

It turns out that that day Redl and Kramer saw the man lying in front of him who could not be brought to justice due to insufficient evidence, and thus committed vigilante justice by breaking his neck.

background

The shooting for The Wrong Witness took place in Neuss , Duisburg , Cologne and Düsseldorf . This sixth episode of the series as been sent ZDF - Saturday thriller .

Helen Dorn subsequently learned from her father that her mother had only died of cancer so early because she had refused chemotherapy. She was just pregnant and didn't want to endanger her unborn child. With this problem: only living because her mother had to die is what the Commissioner is now struggling with.

reception

Audience rating

The first broadcast of The Wrong Witness on November 26, 2016 on ZDF reached 5.34 million viewers and a market share of 17.9 percent.

criticism

Volker Bergmeister from tittelbach.tv wrote: “Author Schnelting puts a lot into the plot. Too much. ”So,“ at the beginning you are confronted with several independent storylines. That arouses curiosity [...] and in the course of the story Schnelting cleverly brings the individual strands together. But he makes the mistake of overloading the case with content. And that's why he doesn't manage to bring all aspects of the plot to their full development. ”“ Dorn remains the sullen and melancholy lone fighter, is aloof, fearless, the bad mood personified. The rough skin removes every nuance from the figure and Anna Loos loses its play opportunities. "And" After the departure of her colleague Matthias Matschke as Georgi, she lacks an adequate play partner, a counterpart who defies her mood and makes the crime thriller so multifaceted. "

The TV Spielfilm editorial team gave the crime thriller a “thumbs up” and said: The case itself would be mediocre, “but the heroine remains exciting”. “Dorn's cases are not that different from their crime colleagues, but the investigator's psychology remains interesting. Dorn is no sunshine. One would not be surprised if the gruff inspector could kill with her looks. "

The Frankfurter Neue Presse said: “While the last Helen Dorn crime thriller offered a certain ambivalence, this film relies entirely on stereotypes. There is still an urgent need for improvement here for future Helen Dorn films. Otherwise the film doesn't work badly at all. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Filming locations at quotenmeter.de, accessed on February 27, 2017.
  2. ^ A b Volker Bergmeister: Anna Loos, Mathias Schelting, Alexander Dierbach. Another solo for the LKA-Frau Filmkritik on tittelbach.tv, accessed on February 27, 2017.
  3. ↑ TV feature film : Film review accessed on February 27, 2017.
  4. ↑ "The wrong witness": Helen Dorn becomes a problem at fnp.de, accessed on February 26, 2017.